This episode features a bootleg recording of film historian Thomas Gunning delivering the lecture "Inventing the Moving Image (and then Forgetting It)" in June 2010 at the workshop On the Periphery of Cinema: Practices, Materials, Objects organized by Katja Müller-Helle and Alena J.

So my comrade in gadget theory, Grant Wythoff, and I have been bouncing notes back and forth for a year or so about the return of the apparatus to media theory. I suppose it'd be more precise to say it never left. But the sources for "apparatus theory" have shifted over the years. In the 1970s and early 80s work by Baudry, Comolli, Mulvey, etc. on film as an ideological apparatus (appareil/dispositif) swept film studies. In the last fifteen years however another, intersecting theory of the apparatus has taken hold in media studies, science studies, theories of digital cinema and so on. Notions of a productive, assembly-like apparatus (dispositif) put forth by Foucault, Lyotard, Agamben and Deleuze today dominate contemporary apparatus theories.

Philosopher Graham Harman, one of the major figures in the philosophical movement known as speculative realism, talks about object-oriented philosophy and his book The Quadruple Object. We also chat about Bruno Latour, the Egyptian revolution, Foucault, Freud, animal rights, and whether or not guns kill people.

Preview: As a followup, the next episode will present the original recording of Quentin Meillassoux's 2007 English-language lecture at the Goldsmiths conference on Speculative Realism.